I have been trying to setup calibre as a stand alone server using the command line only (without the gui). It is to fetch newspapers on a daily basis, tagging them correctly and deleting newspapers which are older than 2 days. Here's my approach.

First I have to get news into calibre server database. Therefore I wrote a simple bash script that is run once a day in the morning as a cron job; for example "The Guardian":

First I remove the old epub file. Then I grap the new epub, in my case using output-profile for a Kobo Touch reader. Just change this to match your device. Then the new epub gets tagged for later retrieval. Finally the epub gets registrated into calibre database.

I can now use the web interface of the server to fetch my daily newspaper. I could also mail the newspaper to the device of my linking. Just put the following snippet at the end of the bash script above:

I am aware that calibre is written in python and so it would be suitable to write a python script instead of using perl. But on the one hand I don't understand python very well (sorry?!). So I better stuck with a language I had been working with before. On the other hand I am far from being a perl or bash programmer. So please don't mind the simple structure of the scripts.

I hope that someone will find this "cli approach" helpful. Hints to improve this way or to correct errors are always welcome.